Is Handshake the best way to hire students for internships?

Before we dig in and attempt to answer the question, let’s first agree that what is “best” for one employer might be terrible for another. One employer might be looking to hire one person in a highly populated metro area such as New York or London while another might be looking to hire hundreds or even thousands in rural areas.

Probably a better question to ask is whether employers who are trying to hire interns and advertise those jobs on Handshake are getting the quantity and quality of applications they need from Handshake? The answer to that question is, for some, yes and, for others, no. Is the success or failure of the advertising campaign within Handshake’s control? Partially. Like any job board or recruitment marketplace, Handshake is kind of like a bus. It wants to fill up its bus with riders and deliver them to where they want to go but it cannot force that connection. In other words, a job board wants a lot of well-qualified candidates to use its site and go to your job posting ad but it cannot force the right candidates in the right volumes to apply.

Handshake is a career service office management platform, meaning that it provides its software to college and university career service offices to help them manage their job posting ads, on-campus interview scheduling, video interviews, and more. Employers can manually post single job ads to Handshake for free, but those who want to hire dozens, hundreds, or even thousands won’t have the time to do so and so they buy Premium packages typically costing $10,000 to $250,000 on annual contracts.

Let’s say that you’re a typical, enterprise-level employer and are quoted by Handshake a Premium package costing $100,000. Some, of course, pay less and many pay more. But let’s use $100,000 as it is in the normal range and a nice, easy, round number. What should that get you?

The average cost to hire a college or university student through on-campus recruiting is about $6,110. Why so much? Because to properly calculate your cost, you need to factor in the costs of labor and travel. With Handshake, College Recruiter, and other on-line solutions, the cost of labor is minimal and there should be no travel costs whatsoever. It isn’t unusual for us to hear employers to tell us that their cost of hiring a candidate through College Recruiter is $250 to $500, so roughly four to eight percent of what they’d pay to hire the same student through on-campus recruiting.

If you’re looking to advertise a job through Handshake or any other site, you’re going to want to do some calculations to determine your likely effective cost-per-hire. If you’re considering paying $100,000 a year to Handshake and your cost-per-hire should be $500, how likely is it that Handshake will be the source of hire for at least 200 of them? If that’s quite likely, the cost of advertising your job openings with Handshake will be a good investment. But if you’re looking at a lower number of likely hires, or if you’ll be unable to track back your hires to Handshake at all due to some technical issue, or if 200 hires isn’t nearly enough, then you’ll likely want to advertise your part-time, seasonal, internship, apprenticeship, and other early career job openings requiring 0-5 years of experience on College Recruiter instead of or in addition to Handshake.